Game Girl Workshop inspires young Palestinians to challenge cultural norms

"It's all about building for me. I'm future-building -- these
girls, our country, our economy." Rasha Salaheddin, a 29-year-old
computer engineer, former developer and games lover is talking to
Wired.co.uk about her role running the Game Girl Workshop, a
women-only forum where teenage girls learn how to design, code and
build a game from scratch in five days. Salaheddin has plenty of
ambition, ability and passion for her work. She also has to be home
by ten every evening, has only one female colleague at the
outsourcing company she works for and is forbidden from crossing
the border to her neighbouring country. Salaheddin lives in the
West Bank, and has an envious ability to look at the future as
entirely changeable.

"She has a lot of things on her mind and her heart," Game Girl
Workshop founder Andrea Hasselager tells Wired.co.uk.

"Boys already have so many things to do; they have
freedom in their lives. So what we have a responsibility to do is
make girls have these same things"

Rasha Salaheddin, Game
Girl Workshop engineer

The two met by accident on Facebook -- Hasselager was looking
for another Palestinian-based coder to help out with an ambitious
project that would see the Danish-run workshop transferred to the
West Bank. The games designer and her team of three -- a
programmer, a graphics artist and a sound artist
(co-founder Nevin Erönde) -- had already trialled the
concept with minority groups of Middle Eastern descent in Denmark
and, encouraged by their young participants' enthusiasm, decided
the burgeoning tech scene in the West Bank might benefit from the
female-only model.

"The stories in most computer games are told from a western,
male perspective," says Hasselager. "To challenge this tendency we
thought a good place to start would be to motivate and inspire
young teenage girls with game development, to show them that
technology can be creative and fun."

For Salaheddin, the workshop directly addressed the root of a
problem she witnessed everyday at her outsourcing company -- a
complete dearth of women working in a rapidly growing tech
industry.

Anni Lyngskær

"I think this issue is not only about Palestine, but it's more obvious in Arab
countries because the culture is a man's society," she says. "Boys
already have so many things to do; they have freedom in their
lives. So what we have a responsibility to do is make girls have
these same things.

"Girls have the ability, and we too are smart and can do many
things, but we need to have that mentality now so [future
generations] can grow up with it. Our culture and how we live
doesn't focus on these things -- girls become teachers and they are
too far from things like programming. So they think it's a man's
field. But there's nothing between men and women, no difference; we
are all human and have a mind. It's about how we rise and grow up,
and the culture around us."

In 2010 Google announced it would invest millions in the West Bank, and in the
years that followed investors continued to pour tens of millions into the tech
industry (Cisco invested £9 million between 2008 and 2012),
pledging to support a community of fledgling startups dotted
between increasingly common outsourcing firms. Figures from
Palestine's Central Bureau of Statistics show that more than 30 percent of homes have internet access --
not too short of the Middle
East-wide average -- and 2,000 Palestinian's graduate with a
degree in technical subjects every year. For women, though, the
positive stats end there.

"Women are attracted to technical subjects due to their
prestige," Ibrahim Abu Kteish, an IT professor at the Birzeit
University near Ramallah whose classes fall just short of a 50/50
gender divide, told Wired.co.uk. "However, only a small number of
women find jobs after graduation," he adds, estimating that around
ten percent of the territory's IT workforce is made up of
women.

"There are many worlds here against girls getting things
-- there are girls who study, but they don't have good job
prospects. Everyone gets married. I want to make my own games and
make people see that girls can do it too"

Jenan
Sawalmy, 14-year-old Game Girl Workshop student

The idea behind the Game Girl Workshop is to provide young,
potential pioneers in the Middle East tech scene with a space to
learn, create and, most importantly, aspire. By ensuring the
teaching staff -- including graduate assistants like Salaheddin --
are only women, the project provides teens with essential role
models lacking in a male-centric community. For girls who may have
already got used to the idea of sacrificing their ambitions to
raise a family, the workshop presents another path. Students would
leave the workshop with the knowledge that they could build
something from scratch, the tools to do so and a model of what that
the future could look like (the programmer working with the team,
for instance, came to Palestine with her boyfriend and baby in tow
-- perhaps a distant or even unwelcome model of what the modern
woman could be for some Palestinians, but nevertheless, it shows
there are alternatives).

Anni Lyngskær

The programme ran in Anabta, Nablus and Balata (the largest
refugee camp in the region). Each one followed a simple teaching
plan -- kick off with a brief introduction of the software
(Propellerhead's Reason Essentials, Audacity's open source audio
software, YoYo Games' Game Maker 8.1 Standard and the Gimp graphics
programme), let the girls play around and pick their specialty,
then split them into groups. They worked independently on themes
like "young and old" or "flourish and decay", teachers only
assisting when difficulties arose.

Although most of the students, aged between 14 and 16, will
probably never code again, a few saw in the workshop exactly what
Hasselager was hoping they might.

Speaking through a translator, 14-year-old Jenan Sawalmy from
Nablus told Wired.co.uk, "Everyone said only boys could do these
things, so I wanted to show everyone I can do some good things
too". Sawalmy, who loves action games and worked as a programmer on
her team, has every intention of pursuing a career in
gaming. "There are many worlds here against girls getting
these things -- there are girls who study, but they don't have good
job prospects. They study and then everyone gets married. I want to
make my own games and make people see that girls can do it
too."

Over the five days, Sawalmy created an impressive game in which
a hunter has to kill enemies and overcome obstacles to save a
princess. "I wanted to show girls, even if you have a lot of
obstacles to face, if you fight really hard you can reach your
goals."

Soft-spoken 15-year-old Ola Shihab worked as a games programmer
on her team. "When I started working, I was very excited -- I was
creating my own game," she says, growing increasingly animated as
she explains the panicked rush to finish the game, and just a
little gleeful when she talks of her brother's jealousy that she
got to create a game, not him.

"I'm more interested now. I feel like Andrea had so much passion
-- now when we play a game, we know how much it took to complete it
and think about the story behind it."

Both Salaheddin and Hasselager were hugely impressed with the
quality of games coming out of the workshop, with rich graphics
illustrating carefully conceived tales. As an outsider, however,
Hasselager was most struck by one major difference between the
games made in Denmark and those in the West Bank.

"I was looking for a solution to live a normal life and
I found that in technology"

Rasha
Salaheddin, Game Girl Workshop engineer

"All the games from Palestine had more symbolic stories -- a
fisherman needs to fish, a hunter needs to kill scary monsters --
whereas the games from the workshops in Denmark had more
individualistic stories." When the Danish girls were given the
theme of "home", Hasselager thought, being children of migrants,
they would riff off it with various conflicting themes of identity.
Instead, they ended up making themselves the centre of a game that
involved finishing household chores so they could make a date.

Anni Lyngskær

"I found it interesting that Jenan was talking about how she
wanted to be like the character in the game she created -- move
forward and kill all the opponents. All the games had a male avatar
or hero."

Palestinian-born Samer Abbas, who works for Middle East social
game portal GameTako,
suggests this is both due to a global familiarity with male
protagonists in games, and social themes of contest.

"In the case of the fisherman game, it is perhaps natural to
have a male character because males are most often the main
breadwinners or hunters in the family," he told Wired.co.uk.

Salaheddin already seems to be positioning herself as an
activist, ready to battle these norms. Women, she argues, suffer
the most from the political situation because the culture dictates
that protection, more than freedom, is of paramount concern when it
comes to the female sex. While Israel puts boundaries around the
territories and on its citizens, the Palestinian culture reinforces
those boundaries by not allowing women to travel freely across
checkpoints, for their safety. Those same boundaries, however, are
encouraging a new generation on to the web.

"I love logical things and I love to make things. So when I was
looking to my future I thought, in a country like Palestine, it's
best to be in technology because it's open for everyone. With the
situation -- borders and check points -- you cannot have the same
opportunities as in any other country. In technology I find I can
have this chance -- I can have an equal opportunity with anyone in
the world because the internet is free. I love to be free, even in
my education. I was looking for a solution to live a normal life
and I found that in technology -- in a technical world I have the
same opportunities that anyone would in the world, and I work with
them -- so I feel happy and satisfied."

It is this same reasoning that has caused the West Bank's tech
scene to grow while industrial sectors remain near dormant -- it's
an industry that relies little on movement.

"This is a sector that has no borders," Murad Tahboub, the
managing director of Ramallah-based ASAL Technologies, told the
New York Times. "You just need electricity and a
telephone line."

Seeing the raw enthusiasm among the teen students Salaheddin is
hoping to set up her own version of the workshop at the village she
hails from. "I'm starting to think I have a responsibility for
all Palestinians, and especially for the girls. I'm from a
village... and I know how hard it is for them."

Anni Lyngskær

Abbas is a firm believer that education is the key to inspiring
the next generation of startups in the Arab world. "I believe
that programming is, or should be, the pencil case of the future, a
set of tools that will help students solve problems," he told
Wired.co.uk. "Programmes like Game Girl are essential not only
because games make education more fun, but also because programming
is demystified".

Investment is trickling into the territories, but gaming is
certainly not a huge priority for local councils. Despite this,
education centres are working independently to ensure the
technology industry succeeds. Birzeit University has setup Computer
Clubhouses in the West Bank's refugee camps, advises start-ups
and holds an annual Robotics Prototyping and Programming Tournament
for nine to 14 year olds.

One key collaboration that could help matters is routinely
suggested and debated. Just an hour's drive away, Israel's tech hub
has been booming since the 90s and in June this year the country's
minister of industry, trade and labour Shalom Simhon called on European companies to form joint ventures with
Israeli and Palestinian companies.

"We focus on the political aspect of the conflict, but we are
not talking enough about the economic aspect," he said. "You
can see in Judea and Samaria, we lifted the barriers and the
economy grew there."

Abu Kteish is skeptical, to say the least. "Economic freedom
means the Israeli companies control 99 percent of the deal and they
leave Palestinian companies the remaining one percent. For the
Israeli government it is important to keep the Palestinian
authority alive, and to show that there are some economic
activities -- but not to advance it. The major obstacle for any
development in Palestine is the occupation itself. The main step
for any business relationship is trust, [and that's] absolutely
missing here."

One former senior diplomat Wired.co.uk spoke with remains just as
dubious about Simhon's call: "I feel very sceptical about
[his] suggestions, and strongly suspect that the
Palestinians will inevitably see it as very much the same mixture
as before -- another example of the Israelis trying to fob them off
with'economic
peace' while having no intention of
moving forward with a serious political agenda. If that is the
Palestinian view, then I think European companies would be making a
mistake to get involved, in the absence of any prospect of a
political process."

Salaheddin, who says local outsourcing companies already work in
cooperation with Israel on big accounts like Cisco or Intel (both
of which have branches in Israel) goes against the grain here,
voicing the opinion of a growing restless youth keen to get on with
their lives.

"I don't like the things Israel does to my country, the same as
any Palestinian. But we win from this -- we don't lose anything.
You cannot make another border to yourself and keep in your place,
you need to be much more open and use this opportunity to grow up.
If you can have your own company without any help, that's ok, but
if you need help -- why not?"

Anni Lyngskær

Tareq Maayah, CEO of Ramallah-based Exalt Technologies, is in
agreement. "Now we are producers and we sell to Israel, as opposed
to just being consumers. It's the start of a better balance in the
economic relationship."

Hasselager had initially wanted to do a joint workshop with
Israeli and Palestinian teenagers -- but a resounding no came from
the university students.

"Many students think only of soldiers or settlers, they have
never seen or met normal Israeli citizens," explains Abu
Kteish.

In July 2012 a World
Bank report stated that Palestinian economic growth was
unsustainable -- too much reliance on foreign aid means industry
could collapse without it. That same month, in a small town called
Allar near Jerusalem, a 15-year-old Palestinian girl became mayor of her town for the summer. The appointment made
her the youngest mayor in the world, and the act made the world sit
up and take note of a country ubiquitous with struggle and
restriction -- restriction of movement and of freedom -- for a new
reason. The appointment said to the world, our advancement will not
be restricted; our aspirations and our education will not be
limited. Bashaer Othman will head back to school at the end of the
summer, but Allar will no longer be ubiquitous with its geography,
next door to the most disputed city in the Middle East. It will be
ubiquitous with future-building.

Game Girl Workshop was sponsored by ActionAid Denmark,
GameMaker and Propellerhead. Visit gamegirlworkshop.org for
more information.